Feasibility assessment and prioritization of renewable energy resources: towards a energy transition for the society and the environment-a case study approach

This work aims to explore the potential of available renewable energy resources such as solar, wind, biomass and ocean energy and select the best suitable renewable energy resource considering technical, economic, environmental, and social constraints as the main criteria. Five sub-criteria are considered for each main criterion, and these twenty sub-criteria are considered for ranking renewable energy resources using Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP). The investment cost of the system having the relative weight of 57.94%. Hence it is recommended to choose the renewable energy source having higher value over the economic aspect. The results also showed that the efficiency of the system is the first prioritized criteria among the technical sub criteria with a relative weight of 38.86%. Similarly, land requirement for the implementation of renewable energy system is the first prioritized criteria (43.38%) among the five environmental sub criteria.The overall results from the AHP showed that economic criteria are the more important aspect with a relative weight of 45.04% followed by Technical, environmental and social criteria with relative weights of 22.5%, 14.16% and 12.62% respectively.For Prioritization of renewable energy resources, the study region divided into nine smaller blocks for investigation using AHP and the hierarchical results showed that solar energy is of highest priority in block 2 whereas wind energy potential is higher in blocks 5 and 9. Due to the dense population and widespread agricultural plantations, Bioenergy has average priority over the entire study region.